Musical Monday – Boyfriend Concept

It’s totally not weird, but this unni has some darling twenty something friends (like early twenties) that I love love love to hang out with. Their mother and I became close way back in the day and I got heart eyes for these two girls hard when they were five and seven and I was twenty-four. To this day they feel like my way younger sisters. And just as any older sister should do, I foist my love of Kpop and cute boys on them at regular intervals…like as regular as possible when they are all adult-y now and one of them lives in another state. It’s like I feel that it’s my duty to train the next (also adult) generation of listeners…even outside of my own spawn.

Like clockwork, I get together with T and Bri every few months to catch up with each other’s lives, eat some yummy food, and force feed them Kpop. Bri is down with some of it, but it isn’t really her thing…we have other stuff in common and she humors me, but eventually she kind of just smiles at me with fond acceptance and texts her cooler friends. T, however, has drunk the Koolaid. One minute the girl groups are her fav because they are all gorgeous and perky. And with the next video she realizes that no, the boy groups are even better. I send her the links to my posts each week to keep her up on the latest and greatest and to expose her to some of the old stuff that I find enchanting. She says she loves it and I’m going to take that at face value because I need the ego stroking.

This weekend, T came to Colorado for Mother’s day so the ladies (T, Bri, and Alix, of course) came to mine for dinner and some videos and to help me with today’s post. I compiled a list of a bunch of new songs and T picked which I should write about. It was a toss up between Day 6’s Dance Dance and Cross Gene’s One Take. She settled on the latter because though both groups are hot as hell, she, like myself, is a sucker for a typical boy group doing the boyfriend concept.

I asked her what it was she liked about Kpop in general and this video in particular and she had some interesting answers. First, she said that she really like the sheer number of people in groups like this. She likes how, though consistent with the overall concept for each video, the individual members could fulfill the varying archetypes of whatever it is they’re portraying. Take this video, for example, the styling for the six members is all super boyfriendy, but all of them are totally different kinds of boyfriends. It’s perfect. It feeds all of the fantasies. Second, she said that she likes the potential for each of the members to provide different musical influences to the group, different styles of singing and rapping, different elements to a song. Again, a little something for everyone. As you get to know a group better, you can hear the individual contributions. And third, she’s keen on how fan oriented Kpop idols are as opposed to American or Western artists. They know and genuinely appreciate that they wouldn’t be doing any of this without their dedicated fans…she’s right. The consistent focus on pleasing the fans might make it difficult to make the music that they want to make in their little hearts, but it’s extremely obvious that they, as idols, are more focused on pleasing their fans than themselves. It’s cultural and it’s how the industry was built, and I’m a sucker for being made to feel special, even when I am one of thousands.

For this video specifically, T was into the long seductive looks into the camera and the little elements that sucked the watcher into the action…like the wink at the camera at 2’05”. But really, really, she was into Shin in his orange sweater. That did it for her.